Sky by George Genovese
Poetose proudly presents its debut chapbook by Australian writer George Genovese! Sewn along the spine, this blue beauty has the title and author in shimmering gold foil.
Sky is the account of a bygone age in which an array of long-forgotten zealots and seekers propound contending visions of the firmament characterized in terms of gemstones peculiar to their schools. For many among them, the Sky is suggestive of an unnerving intruder mysteriously withholding itself in their midst like a speechless stranger, spurring unease unless it is tamed by an ingenious, if unconscious, dialectics. For others it hints of limitless splendor, no less mysterious and overwhelming, yet which they welcome as the benign otherness ushered in upon them by the sky-bearing lovers in their presence. And so begin the exchanges between those of profound learning in search of what terrestrial metal, jewel, or gemstone best distils and fixes the essence of Sky and those of rawer sensibility who seek its true meaning with an instinctive ardor making up for their want in erudition.
Much of the material here will be foreign to contemporary sensibility and likely to exude a quaintness that may well elicit an indulgent smirk from those of us belonging to an age – an enlightened age – that has long since consigned abstruse meditations and reveries such as these to oblivion. That may well be, but whilst we might laud ourselves on having transcended much of the unsophisticated mindset witnessed in these pages it nonetheless remains a truism that only by reacquainting ourselves with the past can we hope to understand the present, and, indeed, orient ourselves toward the future.
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George Genovese has published five volumes of poetry, Time Steals Softer, The Essential Space of Play, Love Letters to the World, A Gloomorous Book in Verse, and Mind Drift, as well as a collection of short stories, The Bookworm and Other Stories, with Ginninderra Press. He has collaborated extensively with Australian Composer Lawrence Whiffin on projects setting his poetry to Whiffin’s inventive and colorful music. In 2010, Whiffin composed a song cycle based on Genovese’s Time Steals Softer for accomplished bass singer, Jerzy Kozlowski and virtuoso pianist Michael Kieran Harvey that was performed by the Astra Chamber Musical Ensemble under the direction of John McCaughey. He has contributed lyrics to two CD releases by Mario Genovese, Crossover and In the Flow, and a poetry CD, A Community of Tree, set to music. He is currently engaged with him on another collection of songs. He has written for The Age and Independent Australia.
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